They also completely neutered new world independence movements by making liberty desire such a joke to counter. You pretty much have to try to have a cn even attempt to revolt, let alone actually succeed.
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Senseless mechanics
- Thread starter Voxtant
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They also completely neutered new world independence movements by making liberty desire such a joke to counter. You pretty much have to try to have a cn even attempt to revolt, let alone actually succeed.
I think a more clear way to do this while maintaining uniformity and preventing any looping would be a percentage-based directed system, where trade nodes could eventually change directions with enough domination over the node (say, you dominate the baltic and white sea nodes as russia) to face towards a new end node.
Another way to have dynamic trade would be to create an independent trade flow system, where each nation has their own configuration, with each node being pointed towards their home node (as the Ottomans, the ragusa and pest nodes would start out pointing towards Constantinople).
Both of these trade systems would be far better than the present, with the second system being more desirable in my opinion but being more taxing in performance.
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The main issue with the current system isn't that you can't make your own "end node", it's that you can't benefit from the trade of much of your land unless you drew the arbitrarily correct hand in which all of the nodes are perfectly aligned to suit your interests (eng channel/venice/genoa)
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Nonsense. Increasing your trade power allows to dominate trade in almost every node. If that's still not enough, you can collect in multiple nodes or/and move your trade capital.
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Collecting trade in non-home nodes is heavily inefficient and avoided when possible. You lose the stacking trade power bonus from merchants transferring to your home node if you collect in nodes outside of your capital.
As an example to illustrate this point, I played a recent game as Inca where my home node was the Caribbean to make use of as much of the South American trade as possible. I had enough trade power to have 60% of the node at a baseline, but using the transferring bonus from pointing my south american+mexican merchants to the caribbean I had 90+% trade power in this very rich node. As I didn't have extracontinental holdings and lacked the power to invade European colonial powers to grab west africa from them, I could not benefit from my La Plata/Brazil trade, as collecting there would handicap the 40 ducats I would lose per month in the Caribbean to get 20 ducats from collecting in those nodes.
I am aware that I could have no CB'd africa or made other moves if I was adamant enough to play extremely optimally, but this is an extremely gamey premise that illustrates how arbitrary the trade system is and the seemingly nonsensical conclusions it results in for player expansion. This is also not at all unique, and is also a factor for Russia and the Baltic/White Sea nodes it expands into, although the stacking trade power lost is often not as relevant.
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That has got to be one of the worst examples for this.
You have a main node with every single one of your others sitting behind it.
Of course you dont collect then.
In almost every other part of the world collecting in multiple places gets you more income.
The Caribean is specificaly designed to funnel all american trade towards europe.
Of course dominating that node gets you money.
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You mean the most illustrative? Nodes in the Americas show very clearly how the trade system is predicated upon the historical outcome, which is unaffected by the state reached in alternate outcomes and results in extreme gameyness in player actions due to the static framework. As a result, my actions were gamey, and would have been even more so if I was attempting to play most optimally for trade income.
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Who cares about the historical outcome.
The talk was about collecting vs steering.
Your example shows one of the rare occurances of steering being better than just collecting everywhere.
Another possibility for this is Lubeck as someone like Denmark.
Getting 20-40% more tradepower from steering helps imensily with combating the english channel pull.
That is until youve conquered England.
The nodes in America are the least fantasy like.
They centralize in one area thats easy to navigate with boats and they go from inland towards the coast.
Regardless of History that way less "gamey" than Africa not being able to flow to India or India to China.
The talk was about collecting vs steering.
Your example shows one of the rare occurances of steering being better than just collecting everywhere.
Another possibility for this is Lubeck as someone like Denmark.
Getting 20-40% more tradepower from steering helps imensily with combating the english channel pull.
That is until youve conquered England.
How can "using the games mechanics in their intended way" possibly be gamey?
The nodes in America are the least fantasy like.
They centralize in one area thats easy to navigate with boats and they go from inland towards the coast.
Regardless of History that way less "gamey" than Africa not being able to flow to India or India to China.
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A game being "gamey" refers to its mechanics being distinctly unimmersive (here is a source corroborating this definition, though it is a fairly common gaming term) enough to discredit its realism.
And the question is not about collecting vs. steering, but about how the direction of trade flow in game is not accurate for alternative historical outcomes and leads to ahistoric directional setups that would not align with reality.
This simply isn't true. The reason they are set up in the way they currently are is so that european powers can efficiently steer American trade to their home nodes.
Bear with me, as this is obviously an ahistorical outcome, but an "Incan trade power" would not move its trade collection site from Peru, where most of its wealth and its dominant populace are located, to land half a continent away and "centralize itself" (using the mechanics available which maximize trade power) in that region. It would have used these coastal nodes to be funneled down through South America to the Peruvian heartland to enrich its home region.
A large amount of all of this relates to the nitty-grittiness of the trade mechanics, which while being very relevant in playthroughs for income maximization is not easily explainable in theory except by using logic. Instead of arguing semantics about the current system (which while being incorrect, is also irrelevant to this thread topic so I don't see a reason in explaining why here), it should simply be self-evident that in alternate historical outcomes the trade system would be directed differently in the RotW.
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Lucky Nations seem a bit silly to me. Most of the Countries who get the bonus already do well anyway because of their size, geography etc., so it just gives them further buffs. Some of the bonuses it gives don't seem very luck related to me. Also, and this depends on whether the game wants to be a historical simulator or a sandbox, the same countries always get the bonus. If the game is supposed to be a sandbox or less rigid in its outcomes, it doesn't make much sense to me that in twelve different playthroughs/'timelines', the same eight countries would always be lucky. I think they should remove it or make it random. Or give it to smaller nations who did well historically, rather than giving France/Austria/Ottomans etc another bonus.
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One possible solution that shouldn't be too hard to implement in EU5 is to measure cultural distance in a similar way to measuring eucleadian distance using lat long. Difference being, of course, that culture isn't fixed to geography so you would need to create a 2d "map" of cultures and then give them individual coordinates. Make it generally reflect a 2d world map, so Middle Eastern is the middle, European to the top, African to the bottom, Asian to the right, and Native Americans to the Left. Then can fiddle each individual culture and move it closer or farther away. I.e., Scandinavian and English would be toward the top, but the former would be more to the right than the latter.
Not a perfect solution by any means, but at least more nuanced than what we have now, and not difficult to implement since it would be a single metric extracted fro a 75x75 or so matrix that does not need to be calculated in game.
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I think it would be a little less messy if each nation had some sets of accepted and unaccepted cultural customs instead of just cultures. Imagine in the game catalan culture have five main customs and castilian culture shares four of them it would mean catalan people would be really integrated in Castilian nation. Also, for example, making high autonomy in catalan privinces developing unaccepted traits to catalan culture.